The concept of electronic language translation has been around since at least the 1980's. For example, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” featured a fictitious “universal” translator that automatically translated a character's spoken language into the language of its target audience, and vice versa.
Today, the capabilities of computer hardware have evolved to a point where electronic language translation is a reality. In the mobile realm, for example, DLP MOBILE recently released the “Speaking Universal Translator”. This application, or “app”, allows two users to communicate with each other in their own languages using a mobile telephone. Referring to FIG. 1, the “Speaking Universal Translator” allows a user to select languages for translation from among a list of supported languages. In the example of FIG. 1, the selected languages are English 10 and Italian 11, which are represented by American and Italian flags, respectively. Before speaking in, e.g., English, a user touches the microphone icon 12 on the English-side 14 of touch screen 15. The user then speaks into the mobile telephone. In response, English text corresponding to the user's speech is displayed in the English text field 16. Italian text corresponding to the user's speech translated into Italian is displayed in Italian text field 17, and Italian speech is output from the mobile telephone. A second user, e.g., an Italian speaker, may respond by touching the microphone icon 19 on the Italian-side 20 of the touch screen 11, and speaking Italian into the mobile telephone. In this case, the process is repeated so that the output from the mobile telephone is English text and English speech.